Leadership is being cut and the competition is fiercer and the bar is higher relative to IC roles.

There are definitely a lot more IC roles, but they’re flooded with applications and you need an in to get your resume reviewed at all.

I’d recommend joining networking communities, building a presence there, and asking for intros based off that presence.

Hello! Thank you for your comment. Yes, there are quite a lot of IC positions compared to management, but almost every company on the west coast goes for LC. I have tried leetcode before and I definitely struggle with those. Besides, it's been 8 years in management so no hands on coding on day-to-day basis. I still do design reviews and I can code with assistance of LLMs but brain puzzles like LC get me. I see many IC positions requiring ML and AI. I have strong backend experience and little knowledge of model training or inference. I am learning ML/AI in the night after I put kids in the bed, but I doubt that's my strong suite to pass interviews.